Government announces new law to bring transparency to the property market

Today the Queen announced that this Government will
introduce a register of the real owners of UK properties. This follows numerous
investigations
by Global Witness and Transparency International UK that have exposed how the criminal and corrupt use
anonymous companies to conceal their identity while they launder and stash
dirty money in UK property.

“For too long, the UK has played a pivotal role in global
corruption by rolling out the red carpet for the criminal and corrupt. As a
result the UK is awash with dirty cash: there are 10,000 anonymously owned properties
in Westminster alone,” said Ava Lee, Senior Campaigner at Global Witness. “This
register will change that, by bringing these shady owners into the light.”

Global Witness analysis has revealed that over 87,000
properties in England and Wales are owned by anonymous companies registered in
tax havens. The value of these properties is at least £56 billion according to
Land Registry data - and likely to be in excess of £100 billion when accounting
for inflation and missing price data.

As of 2019, the areas with the highest number of anonymously
owned properties are:

10,000 in Westminster;

5,729 in Kensington and Chelsea;

2,320 in Camden; and

1,930 in Tower Hamlets.

In 2015 the anti-corruption NGO revealed how
the mystery owner of a £147 million London property empire owned via a network
of offshore companies could be linked to a former Kazakh secret police chief
accused of murder, torture and money-laundering.

/ ENDS

Contacts

Ava Lee, Senior Campaigner, Anti-Corruption

Notes to editor:

This analysis uses Land Registry
data accurate as of 1 January 2019. The dataset used is the Overseas Ownership
dataset, and is available free of charge from the Land Registry. It
contains information on leaseholds and freeholds in England and Wales owned by
non-UK registered companies.

All properties described as “anonymously owned”
are owned by at least one company registered in a “secrecy jurisdiction”.

A country
is considered to be a secrecy jurisdiction if it has a secrecy score of 60 or
above in the Tax Justice
Network Financial Secrecy Index. Price paid data is available for only 30%
of the titles. In order to estimate the value of the titles for which there was
no pricing information, we adjusted for inflation and used the median for
region and tenure.